Checking The Daily Mail: I Heard It Through The Hate Vine

WOMEN don’t have any agency. They don’t choose to have children nor are they capable of rejecting the advances of rich men. Women are wombs to be squirted in to and then used. Women are basically cattle. Welcome to the world of the Daily Mail as most recently articulated by the paper’s newest woman-who-hates-woman, Sarah Vine.

Shipped in to throw shade like an angry ancient oak, Vine’s latest target is Hugh Grant, an old enemy of the Daily Mail’s whose campaigning with Hacked Off has further enraged the potato-faced Paul Dacre. As it goes I don’t agree with Grant’s characterisation of the press, his advocacy for regulatory regimes that would bring the press dangerously close to state control nor his belief that he’s above scrutiny. However, Sarah Vine’s characterisation of his private life, the women he is involved with and his children is vile.

After three pars of name-dropping, boasting that she once sat near Grant at a dinner and complimenting him as a “man [who can] fell a pair of knickers at 100 paces”, Vine pushes the turbo button and spews bile at double-quick speed:

“…he seemed unable to countenance…a long-term relationship with the mother of his child.”

It doesn’t seem like Vine can countenance the thought that the mother of his child may not, in fact, want a long-term relationship with the father of her child. Women are to be acquired and wooed in Daily Mail world. They don’t ever do the deciding or the chasing. After all, it’s 1814, right?

Grant now has a child with another woman and a second child with the first woman. The Mail has dedicated a fistful of ‘news’ stories to decrying the development. Note that’s a development that has precisely cock all to do with you, I or the Daily Mail’s prurient eyebrow raising, moan madams. But Vine concludes:

“Even by modern standards, getting two women knocked up simultaneously is appalling behaviour.”

Still it has to be said she’s an expert in appalling behaviour, her husband, Michael Gove, is currently screwing her and the education system.

And, as you should expect from Sarah Vine, she follows up her high-handed dismissal of other people’s choices with some casual classism and a tinge of racism:

“If Grant were some poor kid from the backstreets of Peckham, we would put his behaviour down to ignorance or social deprivation…”

Then it’s just a quick descent into a poorly conceived – ha! – correlation between Grant’s personal life and his flawed activism of press regulation:

“Through his support – financial and vocal – of an organisation called Hacked Off, he has seized on the justifiable and wholly understandable public anger surrounding cases such as the hacking of Millie Dowler’s mobile telephone to ride the anti-press bandwagon to his – and his celebrity friends’ – advantage.”

Because, as we know, celebrities have no right to any kind of private life if they dare to promote a film or give any kind of interview. We own celebrities and we can destroy them, particularly if their families don’t fit into the specific Daily Mail approved boxes.

Vine concludes:

“Whatever grand motives he may ascribe to his campaign, the fact remains that it appears to be tailored principally to the requirements of Hugh Grant and those in his gilded world who also wish to behave without constraint or criticism.”

A message to Ms Vine: who appointed you as Witchfinder General? Who decided the Daily Mail was the moral arbiter? And who are you to decide that those women didn’t choose to have children with Grant? Unpucker your slapped arse face and focus on something that matters for even the briefest of moments.